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Wednesday, 16 March 2011

Transcription - First Pre-Vis

Sorry for the delayed posting, but I've now got a workaround for playing the animation with sound, without messing up my Youtube account.

Presenting a pre vis today. It's really just the key poses of the animation, and is only rough, but will eventually become a refined animation. There's not much in the way of sets and props, most of them are stand-ins or just unfinished sets. There are also a few scenes that I haven't even started yet and are therefore missing.I have however found out that my rigged bear has a few limitations, that make it a pain to pose.

Here is the pre-vis.

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This pre-vis has helped me see that there are still many timing issues. You may have noticed that the River Splash scene looks different. I found that there isn't enough time to have the bear walk into the ride and walk out, all wet. So instead he takes one step, then splash! The weight of the soggy pillow pulls the bear to the ground.

So what of those limitations I mentioned. Well, the elbow joint is too far up the arm (oops), which is causing some problems, in that it was impossible for the bear to hold an ice cream in front of his big nose. His arms were too short, but it didn't help that the elbow wasn't a decent distance from the shoulder either.

This also caused problems when the bear puts his arm around the pillow (which is for most of the animation.)

The arms were again being a problem when I had to pose him holding a golf club.

So basically I have a bear that manages to fail to do mostly everything that is required of him for this animation. And its all down to his short arms with an elbow right next to his shoulder! Never mind. I know for next time right?

On a more positive note, I have spent a little bit of time on creating some dynamic feathers!Luckily we had our first tutorials on particle instancing which have come in useful. Although I have messed around with particles for a while now, I've never really looked at instancing until now.

Here are a couple of tests.

I don't know why I would want to fill up a glass with feathers, but I couldn't resist. (if anyone else is wondering, this used the nParticle system in Maya, which makes self colliding a whole lot simpler. Using nParticles is probably not necessary for most of the feather effects though.)

OK, now the second one is more useful. Here I am shooting feathers into the atmosphere. The feathers then drift downwards slowly. This is basically what I need for the opening shot.

No doubt though, that I will need different set-ups to achieve some of the other feather effects.